By Wes Walker
Facebook, whose founder paid hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate key battleground states in 2020, now pretends to care about “dangerous extremists” and “threats to democracy”… well, some of them.
This just popped up when I checked my Facebook app.
And you doubt the NSA is illegally spying on @TuckerCarlson and every other conservative? pic.twitter.com/R4XZRwuJx8
— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) July 1, 2021
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Here’s a screenshot of another “helpful” cue they offer.
In Facebook’s new social engineering initiative, they are targeting people who have looked up certain keywords and giving them prompts to change. If only they cared as much about human traffickers who have been using their platform as a way to solicit their victims.
From the Houston Chronicle:
The social media giant has begun serving prompts to some users in the US asking that very question, a company spokesperson said Thursday. It’s also begun notifying people who may have been exposed to extremist content, according to screenshots shared on Twitter.
…The pilot program is part of Facebook’s Redirect Initiative, which aims to combat violent extremism on the site by redirecting people who search for hate or violence-related terms toward educational resources and outreach groups.
“This test is part of our larger work to assess ways to provide resources and support to people on Facebook who may have engaged with or were exposed to extremist content, or may know someone who is at risk,” said a Facebook spokesperson in a statement. “We are partnering with NGOs and academic experts in this space and hope to have more to share in the future.”
That’s pretty rich considering Facebook together with their Big Tech buddies happily set up Parler as the official fall guy for the events of January 6, despite far more of organizing (whatever your opinion of how legitimate or illegitimate those gatherings were) having taken place on Facebook.
Surely we can trust the company whose founder dumped millions into manipulating the electoral process in Democratic cities in key and contested battleground states to be absolutely apolitical in their handling of this issue and our privacy, right?
What do you suppose the over/under is that any of those “search terms” for “violent extremism” will cover that anti-cop slogan “ACAB”? You know, the kind of social media content that fosters this kind of aggression:
Do you know what issue of the day Facebook is not so eager to talk about? One that affects them directly. Via The Crime Report
The Texas State Supreme Court has ruled that Facebook cannot be considered a “lawless no-man’s land” and must be held liable for the conduct of individuals who use its communicative technology to recruit and prey, the Houston Chronicle reports.
[…]
The ruling follows a trio of Houston civil action lawsuits involving teenage trafficking survivors who detail meeting their abusive pimps through Facebook messenger. The survivors further argued that the California-based social media company was negligent, saying Facebook “failed to warn about or attempt to prevent sex trafficking from taking place on its internet platforms.”
The survivors also allege that Facebook itself benefited from the sexual exploitation of trafficking victims, the Houston Chronicle details.
[…]
The majority of online recruitment in active modern-day sex trafficking cases in America last year took place on Facebook, according to the Human Trafficking Institute’s 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report.
“The internet has become the dominant tool that traffickers use to recruit victims, and they often recruit them on a number of very common social networking websites,” Human Trafficking Institute CEO Victor Boutros told CBSN during a recent interview. “Facebook overwhelmingly is used by traffickers to recruit victims in active sex trafficking cases.”
Data from the last two decades included in the human trafficking report showed that 30 percent of all victims identified in federal sex trafficking cases since 2000 were recruited online, according to CBSN.
